Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Estonia Simple Annual Plan Grant for the year 2022

Question from Reda Kerbouche

Hi @K2suvi and Kruusamagi:, thank you for this grant application.

• I have a question regarding the budget --> transportation, you put that you are going to make a visit to Russia, you put the travel budget, but you do not aks for a visa fees, maybe Did you forget or do you have your visa? I recommend you add these fees if it is necessary for you.
• In the budget --> administration you have a staff (Programm manager (0.5), Communication manager (0.5), GLAM project manager (0.5), Education project manager (0.5)) can you provide more detaled job description for these positions please ?

Thank you in Advance--Reda Kerbouche (talk) 16:51, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Hi, and thank you for these questions.

1. Since 2019 Estonians can apply for an electronic and free visa to visit St. Petersburg. Otherwise, we can fit the fee under some other category (administration, etc.).
2. We have several job descriptions on our meta page. For example here under staffing plan from our last application. We also have a more detailed one from the year 2020: the only difference is that we do not have an executive director, but we have an office manager. Executive director and office manager are almost the same, but over the years we have used different names for that job and they have slightly different tasks: office manager is responsible for overseeing other staff work and dealing with day-to-day administrative tasks.

With best --K2suvi (talk) 07:41, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

@Reda Kerbouche: As for the budget: you can look only at this summary section. This is what WMF has wanted (like in previous year): the more detailed part is for internal usage anyway. And visa costs (if we would even need one) are too small, to need a separate budget line even there.

Staffing-related details are brought out here as well. Kruusamägi (talk) 10:14, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of 61,338.85 EUR 66,189 EUR

Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 61,338.85 EUR (~74,901.60 USD) 66,189 EUR (~74,851.10 USD) for your first year with a grant term starting 1 January 2022 and ending 31 December 2022.

The committee is pleased to see many of Wikimedia Estonia’s strengths in its current proposal. For example, the organization’s approach in using Wikipedia to support CLIL (Content and Language-Integrated Learning) in classroom settings is innovative and can potentially support both sustained partnerships with educators and practical support for students. Financially, the chapter has presented a very transparent budget that clearly shows what investments are needed to support its program. Finally, the chapter has a number of new or continuing partnerships with the Ministry of Education as well as local cultural institutions, demonstrating its effective outreach work.

The full amount of funding could not be supported because the Foundation is currently not supporting international travel as a part of its funding activities due to COVID-19-related risks globally, so these expenses were deducted from the requested budget. Any other international travel needs can be reallocated to other needs at your discretion. Should this policy change, your program officer is happy to discuss supporting you with international travel needs. Importantly, there are no specific restrictions on local travel, as long as these activities do not conflict with your local laws and restrictions.

The committee would like to see Wikimedia Estonia prioritize the completion of its strategic plan to support the guidance of its future work in this next year, and the organization should be prepared to submit this with its next funding application. The organization has identified a number of specific organizatonal values and principles from 2018, which the committee appreciates and believes will help support the development of this document. A concrete organizational strategy is especially important given Wikimedia Estonia’s extensive history of movement engagement. Developing a long-term strategy will be a necessary step to help inform the committee and the wider Wikimedia movement understand how you want to change or grow your work, as well as how it will align with Movement Strategy principles.

We look forward to supporting Wikimedia Estonia in its work in 2022. On behalf of the committee, MikyM (talk) 17:45, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

@MikyM: That travel part only accounts for 5.8% of the planned budget, but the cut is 4x as big. What about the rest of 15.9%?

We have been dealing with the strategy for quite some time now and plan to complete the WMEE 2030 strategy by the upcoming spring. The current 9-page long document is still in draft status, but I can confirm that we are dealing with it (the last strategy meeting was in the 1st week of December and the next one would be in the middle of January). Kruusamägi (talk) 16:37, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

@Kruusamägi: For transparency, I am following up here with part of my response over e-mail which I sent earlier to you:

The Simple APG Committee made this recommendation to WMEE last year:

Wikimedia Eesti has done some strategic work, forming the chapter's strategic goals, but there is no progress to turn these goals into a comprehensive Strategic Plan. Additionally, there is no change in the defined strategic goals, and attempts to adjust them to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. We request that Wikimedia Eesti works on their Strategic Plan and tailor it to the new recommendations of the Movement Strategy 2030. We also ask that the staff members take on roles to support volunteer engagement in strategic thinking.

The Regional Committee noted this recommendation from last year. In the current application, it was not clear to them how Wikimedia Eesti addressed this need in the past year.

Your current explanation around your work around strategy is helpful, but I'm not sure this was clearly conveyed in the application [...] This strategic purpose is not something that came through clearly in the application. I am glad to hear that WMEE is operating on a strategy internally, but without some documentation or a draft of this strategic plan, there was no way for the Regional Committee or myself to understand how your activities are connected to a broader set of principles. You had said you had a long document available, so if a strategic plan wasn't fully complete or finalized at the time of application, I think it would have been helpful to submit a draft or some kind of summary, and to note that your organization plans to further develop or further refine this strategic plan in the coming year.

If there are other barriers that are preventing or hindering your organization's work on your strategic plan, we would be interested in learning more about it and what support you might need to complete this work. Let me know if it would be supportive to have a conversation about these needs. In the meantime, I will follow-up with the committee on the adjustment to the approved funding amount.

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:06, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

@Kruusamägi: Not a reply to the above, but the committee has approved an adjustment to the funding decision based on your feedback.

• Total funded amount will be adjusted from 61,338.85 EUR to 66,189 EUR (~74,851.10 USD).

Please let me know if you have any questions. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 18:13, 17 December 2021 (UTC)